The State Strikes Back

We've talked about how the violence might start: what happens when the State strikes back?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
They come for you in the night. One minute you're asleep,
warm and swaddled in your blankets, and the next you're
awoken by a loud, crashing sound, defended by the light
on the end of a police officer's a R fifteen.
You raise your hands up defensively, too shocked to think.
Hand grabs you by the wrist and yanks you hard
off the bed, nearly pulling your arm out of its socket.

(00:22):
Several men shout loudly, all at once. Their voices merge
together into one confusing, chaotic mess. But you know enough
not to resist as they jam your arms behind your
back and cut your wrists. As the fog of sleep
gives way to intelligent thought, your conscious mind finally understands
what this is arrayed. As they drag you out into
the hallway, you realize exactly what this must be about.

(00:44):
Two days ago, two police officers were shot dead just
outside your building. They weren't the heavily armed, militarized cops
you see at checkpoints near the Separates side of town.
These men were normal patrol officers walking a beat when
some partisan sniper gun them down. At a distance. You
walked past the spot where they died just a few
hours earlier, on your way home from work, someone had

(01:05):
spray painted all cops are bastards on the wall above
where both men had died. You remember staring at the
blood stains on the concrete, fighting down nausea and wondering
what was going to come next. Now you know. The
officers drop you one ceremoniously against the outside wall of
your apartment. Your next door neighbor sits opposite from you,
next to his front door. His nose is broken, blood

(01:27):
streams down his face. You lock eyes. Neither of you
says anything, but you share a look that says, so,
let's come to this, huh. Back behind you, armored cops
tear through your living room, in bedroom, emptying pillows of stuffing,
turning over your bed and couch, looking at every conceivable
nook and hidy hole, where a single delirious second, you
find yourself consumed with worry that they might steal some

(01:50):
of the bags of coffee you stockpiled. You can't afford
to buy more At the current prices ever since Mexico
closed their border, good beans cost more than your rent.
You know you should feel violated, You should be livid
right now, rather than just worried about your stash. A
distant part of you does feel that way, But after
the last few years of escalating police patrols, after all

(02:10):
the hours spent waiting at checkpoints in the constant vehicle searches,
this just sort of feels like the inevitable culmination of events.
Another group of cops rushes past you down the hallway
with a clattering of body armor and heavy metal deer.
All their faces are covered by goggles, helmets, and ski
masks with skulls printed on the face. The skulls are
black and white, just like the colorless American flags on

(02:33):
their shoulders. You realize with some surprise that none of
them have any visible rank or unit insignias on their armor.
You don't even really know if they're police or soldiers.
You guess at this point the difference is mainly academic.
One of them carries a battering ram, but your eyes
are drawn to a short man at the rear of
the group. On his hip is a sheathed tomahawk. Something

(02:54):
about that sets your skin on edge. An ax is
not the kind of tool you use to restore order
or to protect people. It has one purpose to cut
through flesh and bone. The cops or whatever they are,
batter open the next door and rush into the third
and final apartment on your floor. They're shouting the sound
of a struggle, and then a single gunshot shatters the night.

(03:16):
An eerie silence descends on the hallway. You and your
neighbors share another look. The dread on his face says
more than any words ever could. After a few seconds,
the short man with the tomahawks steps out of the room,
his hand on the shoulder of a tall officer. You
see a wisp of smoke curl up off the other
man's rifle. His front is splattered with blood, drops of
its stay in. The black and white flag on his

(03:37):
shoulder the only color on his dismal uniform, and once
again you find yourself wondering what comes next. In two
thousand fifteen, I visited Kiev, capital of Ukraine, about a
year after the successful My Dawn Revolution overthrew that country's
wanna be dictator Viktor Yanukovich. This was also about a

(03:58):
year into Ukraine's war with the Russian backed separatists. I
interviewed a bunch of veterans of the Maidan Revolution. Most
were young men and women. At one point I sat
down with a married couple, both in their mid twenties.
They were both fairly small people, of tiny build and stature.
I listened while they explained how they'd faced off against
the Barkut the Berkout. Where are Ukraine's elite riot police.

(04:22):
If you've ever seen an American cop at a civil
disturbance or riot wearing full body armor and wielding a
truncheon or a gas gridade launcher, or one of those
pepper ball guns that looks like a cross between a
paintball gun and an air fifteen, they looked sort of
like that. All riot cops look pretty much the same.
That is to say, they look like Darth Vader. You're
meant to be intimidated by them, awed by the sight

(04:44):
of dozens or hundreds of these tall armor plated badasses
slowly tromping towards you while a commanding voice bellows over
a painfully loud speaker on the back of a tank.
Disperse this is an unlawful gathering. Now. These two people
I was sitting with had gone face to face with
the Verkout as part of a shield wall of volunteers
who had for weeks successfully pushed back the assaults of

(05:07):
this army of darth vaders. I knew that intellectually, but
I could not square that fact with the unimposing reality
of these two spindly tech geeks who were sitting in
front of me. Eventually, I asked them, both of you
are tiny, and your software developers not m m A fighters.
How do you go face to face with armored cops
and win? The young woman smiled at me and sort

(05:29):
of raised out her arms to pantomime the shape of
a riot shield. It's similar to the kinds of shields
Roman legionnaires used to carry, but black, she explained, the
barcoot carried these big shields, and if you're small, you
can get in low and grab the shield by the
bottom and flip it up. With all that armor, they're
very top heavy. It's easy to get them off balance,
especially with all the ice on the ground. Then when

(05:51):
they fall on their backs, they are like a turtle,
so you stomp on them. In addition to being a
useful bit of practical advice, if you, dear listener, I
find yourself facing off against riot cops, I found her
advice to be powerfully symbolic of the nature of state power,
it always looks formidable. Perception of a monopoly on the
use of force is important for any government. If people

(06:14):
don't think a revolution is possible, they're less likely to revolt.
But once things get going, once push comes to literal shove,
the might of the police and even the military often
proves to be less imposing than it appears on paper.
In other words, the man has a glass jaw. Welcome
to episode three of It could happen here the Second

(06:36):
American Civil War. To recap our hypothetical timeline, a financial
crash has shattered the U S economy into pieces. Left
wing activists have occupied centers of several a major American cities,
including Wall Street in New York City. Several of these
occupations have surely been crushed that others have successfully held
off the police and created autonomous zones free of state control.

(06:58):
Terrorist attacks, mash shootings, and perhaps even bombings against demonstrators
from one side or the other have grown more common. Meanwhile,
out in the country, separatists resist the government calls to
disarm them. A potent insurgency has cut off the water
supply and the roads to some of America's most productive farmland.
The body count and the cost of food rises, the
stock market falls. Most people are probably still loath to

(07:22):
call this a civil war, but deep in Washington, that's
exactly how the guardians of the state have decided to
treat it. The government's first line of defense would be
the police and of course the power of law. So
if we're going to ponder over how the system might
strike back against this threat to its very existence, we'd
better start with Congress. Let's assume the government starts by

(07:44):
trying to placate the demonstrators without much success. To appease
the yellow vest protesters, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, repealed
the controversial gas tax on December fourth, two thousand eighteen.
As of mid March when I'm writing this episode, the
protests are still ongoing. Placation does not always work, So
let's imagine Congress tries to wave a carrot reducing gas

(08:06):
taxes and promising investigation into the financial industry. May be
approving some federal funds to help struggling homeowners. Like most
things our Congress does, it's half hearted and heavily compromised
by partisan bickering. The protesters and separatists are not placated.
So what happens next when the government's first attempt to
restore order fails. We can find some clues to this

(08:27):
in the Standing Rock protests and the protests in d
C during present Trump's inauguration. In the immediate wake of
both of these unprecedented acts of resistance, the man did
what the man does, tried to stomp down on the
power to actively resist. In the wake of both protests,
more than twenty states proposed bills that restricted the rights
of protesters and also protected the rights of people who

(08:49):
did violence against those protesters. In response to protesters blocking
pipelines under construction on Native American territory, Oklahoma past h
B one one two three. This increased penalties for trespassing
on critical infrastructure. Protesters who simply showed up to protest at, say,
the side of a pipeline, could find themselves looking at
a year in prison. Damaging equipment increase the penalty to

(09:12):
ten years. In North Dakota, sight of the Standing Rock protest,
two bills were signed into law punishing people who wear
masks or cover their faces at protests and increasing the
potential prison term of participating in something deemed a riot.
To ten years. In Tennessee, a bill was proposed that
would give quote civil immunity for the driver of an
automobile who injures a protester who was blocking traffic in

(09:35):
a public right of way if the driver is exercising
do care. By the time Heather Higher was murdered by
an angry fascist demonstrator in a car, six states had
proposed measures similar to that Tennessee bill. In Texas, Representative
Pat Fallon attempted to straight up legalize ramming protesters with cars. Now,
I want to remind you of a few things. Number One,

(09:58):
state level congress people like Pat Fallon often wind up
running for and winning federal office. And number two, the
inciting incidents for most of these bills were peaceful protests.
So when I think of those facts and I imagine
the government's response to an activist movement that has literally
barricaded chunks of major American cities and said you can't

(10:18):
come in, well, I don't imagine the federal government's first
response would be violence, But I see them winding up
at violence rather quickly. I don't think we start off
with police snipers using live rounds on protesters as they
did in Ukraine, but I can see American police being
called in from other parts of the state and other states.
This would bring in huge numbers of officers more used

(10:40):
to handing up parking tickets than using tear gas. They'd
be suddenly thrown in to try and clear out an angry,
organized group of activists behind barricades, tossing jars of fecal
matter and urine firework, stink bombs, whatever they have. I
do not have any trouble imaging debts at several of
these clashes. There's been a lot of talk and a
lot of articles in the last few years about the

(11:00):
rise of the warrior cop. As left wing magazine Mother
Jones put it, militarized policing is a hot button issue.
At the tail end of his term, President Obama tried
to stem the flow of military grade weapons and vehicles
to law enforcement, but that executive order was reversed in
two thousand seventeen. The thing is, police officers aren't soldiers.
Some of them are veterans, and a few are even

(11:22):
combat veterans, but most are just cops. Looking like a
soldier does not necessarily mean you can operate like one.
More than two point two million Americans have served in
the War on Terror and been deployed to one of
its many hot spots. Most of those people are not
combat veterans either, but they all hold valuable skills, the
kind of skills that could help a group of protesters

(11:43):
occupy the center of a large American city, organized their
supplies and communications, and even physically resist the police. At
Standing Rock, I met veterans with information security backgrounds focused
on providing the protest camps with secure internet access, and
Kiev during the Might on protests, old Soviet veterans of
the fighting in Afghanistan helped stiffen the backs of scared,

(12:05):
young protesters facing off against lines of riot police. American
veterans are significantly more politically active than the average citizen,
six percent more likely to vote. Because of their experience
working as part of a large, organized whole, and because
of their specialized skills, veterans make fantastic activists. They also
make fantastic terrorists, insurgents, and freedom fighters. This is something

(12:29):
that came up during my talk with David Kilcolin back
in two thousand sixteen. He told me about something called
Fuco's boomerang. This is an idea proposed initially by Michelle
Fucot to explain why military techniques originally developed by colonial
powers to put down insurrections and colonies eventually wound up
being used by those same nations on their own people.

(12:49):
One great example is the concentration camp. It was initially
deployed by the Spanish against their Cuban colony, and then
by the British against their South African colonies, until eventually,
during the World War the technique wound up in Europe
being used on Europeans. The science of finger printing and
the idea of panoptic prisons are two more examples of

(13:09):
techniques Europeans initially developed to maintain colonial order and then
brought back to their own countries. Fuco himself wrote quote,
it should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its
techniques and its political and judicial weapons, obviously transported European
models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang
effect on the mechanisms of power in the West and

(13:29):
on the apparatuses, institutions and techniques of power. A whole
series of colonial models was brought back to the West,
and the result was that the West could practice something
resembling colonization or an internal colonization on itself. In his
important book Cities under Siege the New Military Urbanism, Professor
Stephen Graham argues convincingly that the same thing is happening

(13:50):
now in the United States as a result of the
techniques are military developed initially to fight insurgents in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Quote. These operations act as testing grounds for
technology and techniques to be sold on through the world's
burgeoning homeland security markets. Through such processes of imitation, explicitly,
colonial models of pacification, militarization, and control honed on the

(14:12):
streets of the global South are spread to the cities
of the capitalist heartlands in the North. In other words,
if you want a picture of how our government and
our military will respond to a separatist movement in the
United States, just look at what they've done in other
countries when their cities defied us. This is why, as
this podcast goes on, I'll repeatedly refer to what the U. S.

(14:32):
Military did in Mosul and Rocah. But right now, for
this episode, what's important is that the boomerang effect cuts
both ways. The state right now is armed with a
whole host of weapons and tactics it perfected fighting insurgents
in Iraq in Afghanistan. But American cities and the American
countryside are also filled with men and women who spent
years of their lives fighting those wars and those insurgents.

(14:56):
They paid attention to what the enemy did, what worked,
and what didn't. Now, I want to make it clear
before we go on that I'm not saying veterans are
inherently violent people or anything like that. I don't think
they're more likely to become terrorists than anyone else. But
if they do make that choice, they have a much
wider range of capabilities than say, a radicalized former kindergarten teacher.

(15:18):
We already have a significant history in the very recent
past of U. S. Military veterans coming back from deployments
abroad and embarking on one man crusades to bring the
war home. We do. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber,

(15:43):
was a combat veteran. He killed people for his country
before he murdered the people of his country. Tim probably
never heard of Fucot's Boomerang, but without knowing it, his
life perfectly embodied the theory I'd like to quote from
the book American Terrorists, probably the best buy graphye of
Timothy McVeigh quote. In reaching his decision to bomb a

(16:04):
federal building, McVeigh had been operating in a purely military
state of mind. The bombing, to him, was an act
of tactical aggression, nothing more, nothing less. The Army had
been his teacher in the horrors of war. He had
learned to cope with unthinkable cruelty, and now he would
put the lessons the army had taught him to practice
on native soil. You learn how to handle killing in

(16:26):
the military, he explained. I faced the consequences, but you
learn to accept it. This brings me to the story
of Christopher Dorner. Before he was a Los Angeles cop,
Chris Dorner was a Naval reserve officer who had been
deployed to Bahrain with the Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Unit
for two years. He was a well trained and experienced

(16:46):
soldier and a qualified marksman with both rifle and pistol.
Up until two thousand thirteen, Officer Dorner seemed like a
model human being. In two thousand two, while training Advanced
Air Force Base, he and a comrade found a bag
with a thousand dollars of cash inside it, property of
the Enid Korean Church of Grace. They turned in. They
turned the money into the police. At the time. When interviewed,

(17:09):
Dorner stated, quote, there was a couple of thousand dollars
and if people are willing to give that to a church,
it must be pretty important to them. He emphasized that
his mother and the military had both taught him to
be an honorable man. And two thousand thirteen, Christopher Dorner
was fired by the l a p D. He claimed
that this was because he reported on the use of
excessive force within the department, beatings of suspects and homeless

(17:32):
people for no reason. He tried to report these things
and was shut down. Rather than next going to a
journalist or the a c l U, or generally taking
any of what we consider to be the acceptable roads
our society provides people to attempt to redress these grievances,
Chris Dorner decided that none of that was likely to work.
He chose a redder path. On February one, two thousand thirteen,

(17:56):
Anderson Cooper's office received a package from Dorner. It in
included a DVD laying out his case against the department
and a challenge coin issued by l a p D
Chief William Bratton. Challenge coins are basically POGs for soldiers
in law enforcement, metal coins and blazoned with the logo
of this department, that office, through this general, et cetera.
Chris Dorner had shot this coin and attached to it

(18:18):
a note that said one m o A. An m
o A is a minute of angle. By writing this,
he was essentially saying that he had shot the coin
from a hundred yards away with a grouping of one inch.
In other words, Chris Dorner was saying, I am a
very very good shot. Be afraid. On February third, two

(18:39):
thousand thirteen, Chris Dorner shot and killed Monica Quan, the
daughter of a former l a p D captain and
Keith Lawrence, her fiancee, and a campus police officer. This
kicked off a rampage that would last until February the twelfth.
It was a chaotic, terrifying time for the l a
p D. Many officers went to work feeling like, in essence,

(18:59):
the predator was after them. It was also a terrifying
time for black men who looked vaguely like Chris. There
are pictures of one guy wearing a white T shirt
with the words not Chris Dorner written on his chest
and sharpie. Over the course of his rampage, Chris killed
two additional police officers and wounded three others. The l
a p D took all patrol officers off their motorcycles

(19:22):
for the duration of his spree. Protection details were set
up for the forty police officials named in his manifesto,
and thousands of officers were redeployed to watch the highways
of southern California. I went to read you some exerpts
from the manifesto Chris sent out on February fourth, in
the middle of his one man war against the l
a p D. Citizens slash non combatants. Do not render

(19:44):
medical aid to downed officers slash enemy combatants. They would
not do the same for you. They will let you
bleed out just so they can brag to other officers
that they had a one eight seven caper the other
day and can't wait to accrue the overtime in future
court subpoenas. As they always say, that's the paramedics job,
not mine. Let the balance of loss of life take place.

(20:06):
Sometimes a reset needs to occur. This will be a
war of attrition and a pyrac and Camdean victory for myself.
You may have the resources in manpower, but you are
reactive and predictable in your apt plans. I have the
strength and benefits of being unpredictable, unconventional, and unforgiving. Do
not waste your time with briefs and table tops. Chris

(20:29):
was finally cornered in a cabin on a mountaineer big
Bear Lake, California. It's presumed he shot himself after the
police fired in munitions that lit the cabin on fire
around him. Three years later, in two thousand sixteen, Micah
Xavier Johnson followed in Chris's footsteps when he opened fire
on and killed five Dallas police officers during a protest.

(20:50):
Johnson was an Army reserve officer and veteran of the
Afghan War. Later that same year, Gavin Eugene Long ambushed
and shot six Louisiana police officers in Baton Rouge. Three
of his victims died. Gavin Long had spent five years
in the United States Marine Corps. He'd served one tour
in Iraq. Now Long was not a combat soldier, but

(21:11):
every Marine is a trained rifleman, and every Marine receives
training on basic combat tactics, including how to set up
the sort of ambush he carried out expertly against those
baton rouge cops. The United States military has gotten extraordinarily
good at training young men for battle. Even the soldiers
who don't see combat can wind up quite proficient. These

(21:31):
three cases are ample evidence of how much damage a competent,
trained person can inflict on American police officers. But Chris
Dorner is the case that's most interesting to me and
I think most relevant to our discussion here. He was
clearly a man of passionate beliefs, a man who felt
that something terribly wrong had been done by the police.
His actions effectively tied up the l a p D,

(21:54):
one of the largest armed forces on this planet for
more than a week. Imagine if he'd been out there
hunting cops in the middle of a major protest campaign.
This is part of why I can pretty easily imagine
some sort of more badass occupy style movement managing to
hang on and control territory in several American cities despite

(22:14):
the best efforts of law enforcement. One angry, radicalized vet,
armed with the kind of weapons you can buy just
about everywhere in America could pretty easily lock down an
entire cities law enforcement during a time when they would
not have many officers to spare. And remember the boomerang effect,
Police departments already react, shall we say, forcefully whenever an

(22:35):
officer dies. Because Black Lives Matter was in the news
when Mica Johnson and Gavin Long carried out their attacks,
and because they were both black men, there were calls
around the country to declare BLM a violent extremist group,
despite a general lack of connections between either shooter and
Black Lives Matter as an organization. If an angry veteran
with a bolt action sniper rifle started shooting NYPD cops

(22:58):
while a huge chunk of Manhattan was locked down by protesters,
well it doesn't exactly take a big logical leap to
imagine the cops might blame those deaths on the protest movement,
so their violence against the protesters would escalate, and more
activists would be killed and injured. More videos of police
violence would go viral. This would inspire more anti police

(23:19):
vigilantes to start hunting cops on the streets, and the
cycle would continue, driving everyone to more extreme acts of
violence and gradually ratcheting up the body count. And this
is where the other side of the boomerang effect would
come into it, because an awful lot of police officers
or veterans too, And when these guys start facing the
same kinds of attacks they faced when they were deployed

(23:40):
to Baghdad or wherever, they would respond using the same
sorts of repressive measures. And as Cuko predicted, American citizens
would soon find themselves and during something millions of Iraqi
and Afghan people already know quite well the midnight raid.
Talk to any Iraqis Edison who grew up in Kirkuk

(24:01):
or Fellujjah in the early aughts, and they will tell
you stories of American soldiers suited up like something from
a science fiction movie, with giant guns and body armor
and wild and sectoid looking optic equipment, breaking down doors
in the dead of night and dragging people off into custody.
Sometimes these people were insurgents, sometimes there were innocent civilians

(24:22):
victims of mistaken identity. In every instance, the raids were
terrifying for everyone involved. And when you've got a bunch
of jumpy, armed young men breaking down doors and the
dead of night looking for terrorists. Well, there's a lot
of room for error, the fatal kind of error, since
most of you aren't familiar with what happens in one
of these raids. I'd like to quote from several of

(24:43):
the fifty or so veterans who were interviewed by the
Nation in two thousand seven about their activities in Iraq.
Sergeant John Brune served in Baghdad and Abu Grab. He
carried out numerous night raids on the local people. He said, quote,
you want to catch them off guard. You want to
catch them in their sleep. You run in and if

(25:03):
there's lights, you turn them on. If the lights are working,
If not, you've got flash lights. You leave one rifle
team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle
team leader has a head set on with an earpiece
and a microphone where he can communicate with the other
rifle team leader that's outside. You go up the stairs,
You grab the man of the house. You rip him
out of bed in front of his wife. You put

(25:23):
him up against the wall. You have junior level troops.
P f c's specialists will run into the other rooms
and grab the family and you'll group them all together.
Then you go into a room and you tear the
room to shreds, and you make sure there's no weapons
or anything they can use to attack us. These police
raids would surely lead to bloody accidents, as even routine
traffic stops due to day. Marine Reserve Lieutenant Jonathan Morgenstein

(25:47):
served in Ramadi from August of two thousand four to
March of two thousand five. He noted, quote, I mean
you physically could not do an investigation every time a
civilian was wounded or killed, because it just happens a lot,
and you'd spend all your time doing that. I want
to remind you that these soldiers carrying out these raids,
which often ended in death, have vastly more training than

(26:09):
any police officers conducting the same raid in the United
States would be likely to have. A seconds googling found
me the two thousand and nine New York Times article
soldiers kill Iraqi couple during raid at home is an
example of the kind of headlines you might expect to
see if this were to happen in the United States.
So imagine being the protesters in a camp in a

(26:29):
major American city and waking up to see a headline
like that about one of your neighbors. Imagine how the
other protesters in that camp will react. Imagine this being
someone's last straw, the final thing that makes him decide
to pick up a gun and try to ambush a cop.
You see how this all works, right, Each little step
forward makes everything worse and exacerbates all these tensions that

(26:50):
in calmer times would fade back down. None of the
individual pieces are unprecedented, but if they all happened close
enough to each other, it creates this accelerating psyche of violence.
So imagine a bunch of cops facing off against screaming
protesters every night, knowing they could get shot from behind
at any moment. Imagine them doing that for days on end,
working double shifts like the police in Paris did during

(27:13):
the height of the Yellow vest protests, and every few
days or weeks some new nuts starts hunting cops. Some
of these vigilantes will be stopped right away, others might
continue to kill for weeks. To the police, everyone would
start to look like an enemy. That kind of stress
does not make any group of human beings better or
more compassionate. I'd like to quote from one more veteran

(27:35):
staff sergeant named Camillo maya quote the frustration that resulted
from our inability to get back at those who were
attacking us lead to tactics that seemed designed to simply
punish the local population that was supporting we don't now.

(28:01):
I know police violence in the United States is one
of the most controversial topics in the country right now.
I'm trying to be as even handed as possible in
my presentation of things, So I want any police officers
or back the blue folks listening right now to know
I'm not trying to inherently write law enforcement off as
the bad guys here. This would be a terrifying and

(28:22):
demoralizing situation for the vast majority of American law enforcement.
The people they'd be fighting wouldn't all look like Christopher Dorner,
a dude with a squeaky clean record of service and
a clear articulated reason for his rampage. Some of them
would be long standing members of violent criminal groups like
m S thirteen, the Eighteenth Street Gang, or Barrio s Teca.

(28:44):
While I was researching that two thousand sixteen Cracked article,
several of the experts I interviewed independently brought up the
same thing. They expected that organized criminal groups would absolutely
get involved in any kind of serious fighting that broke
out in a city where they had a strong presence.
Is actually a pretty common occurrence in civil wars. David Kilcolin,
the former State Department strategist, told me this. There's often

(29:07):
a criminal element in early stages of insurgencies which often
gets purged later. Street criminals in particular, are much more
likely to use violence. You see this with gangs and
early insurgent movements brought in a lot of street thugs
early to just sort of raise the temperature and get
everybody used to it. Raising the temperature is critical because
it's how we go from mass unrest to outright revolution.

(29:30):
Lone wolf nuts, small violent cells of people willing to
use deadly force, don't inspire the masses as much as
they get them increasingly used to violence, and that is
a critical step on the road to turning a series
of protests into a civil war. On October twenty two,
two thousand eleven, Business Insider ran an article with this

(29:51):
super fun headline quote. The FBI announces gangs have infiltrated
every branch of the military. It's one of those increasingly
rare tidal that really accurately describes what's going on. Here's
a quote from the FBI's report. Quote. Through transfers and deployments,
military affiliated gang members expand their culture and operations to

(30:12):
new regions nationwide and worldwide, undermining security and law enforcement
efforts to combat crime. Gang members with military training pose
a unique threat to law enforcement personnel because of their
distinctive weapons and combat training skills, and their ability to
transfer these skills to fellow gang members. Right now, there
is no evidence that any American street gangs support any

(30:33):
kind of organized activity against the U. S. Government other
than you know, selling drugs and stuff. They're primarily money
making organizations. But criminals have a long history of making
fantastic revolutionaries. Abu Musab al Zarkawi, the George Washington of Isis,
was a drug dealer and gangster back in Jordan before
he found Allah. Joseph Stalin robbed Banks before the Bolshevik Revolution.

(30:55):
It is not so great a jump from gang leader
to revolutionary. American society is seated with people who have
the know how and the tools necessary to raise the
temperature in our society to uncomfortable levels, and within the
affected cities themselves, the places dealing with large protest camps,
police checkpoints, nighttime raids, and escalating violence, well, I think

(31:17):
things could get hot fast. I remember one moment vividly
from my second trip in the Mosle. We were embedded
with a unit of the Iraqi Federal Police. Don't let
the name fool you. These guys had tanks and artillery
and mortars and rocket launchers and machine guns, and we
watched them use all of it. The Federal police were
infamous among the civilians of Mosle for using heavy weaponry

(31:40):
with reckless abandon and crowded neighborhoods filled with sheltering families.
They were nice guys outside of that, but I would
not have wanted to wind up on the other side
of their ire or their fire. After we spent a
little time embedded with them and we're leaving, I tried
to convey my gratitude to their colonel for hosting us.
I think I came across more as saying thank you
for what you're doing against isis than thanking him for

(32:02):
his hospitality. And I'll always remember his response don't worry
your police would do the same thing if this happened
in your country. That sentence has haunted me ever since,
because once the cycle of violence gets well under way,
once the dead on both sides number into dozens and
start edging up to the hundreds, a chain of events
will have been set into motion that will lead inexorably

(32:24):
to the direct involvement of the military and a literal
war between the American government and many of its people.
This is the point at which many of you might
suspect the violence would rather quickly come to a close.
After all, protesters with molotov cocktails and insurgents with air
fifteens could not possibly last long against the unleashed might

(32:46):
of the American military. In our next episode, I'll tell
you why you shouldn't be so sure about that. People
cross want to tell him mom guns you should see
how the jaw dropping to tell him. Why ain't talking

(33:07):
to sorrow to keep these front door on the clock
in NATO, Because I don't just the cops, y'all, says
he knowing everyno' all I do is laugh that spine
on the spine here. Everybody's gone test taking Norris taking
no exacting where you stand and understand that this me

(33:31):
is strapping. Hey, it's about time. I'm a little friend,
spouts when speaking in It'll be your voices, Stern wings
when of that stats that the dead cats, but the
weapon's around black pantacton and snap back turned back and
the hands on. Anybody questions he's fucked up? We all knowing, baby.

(33:54):
The question is when the fun we wait? Some president
take the name you can fix. You can fix your fix.
I'm Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted from reading all
of that. You can find me on Twitter at I
right okay. You can find this show on Twitter at

(34:15):
happen here pod, and you can find the show online
at it could happen here pod dot com. Our music,
as always, is from Four Fists